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An undead Nazi soldier brings a memento to the daughter he never knew in ZOMBIE LAKE. ZOMBIE LAKE


Le Lac des Morts-Vivantes 1980, Redemption, 86m 47s, $29.95 (BD), $24.95 (DVD) By Tim Lucas


Since its first domestic ap- pearance as a big box release on the Wizard Video label, Eurociné’s ZOMBIE LAKE has become as notorious as any shoddy spook show ever to carry the imprint of Monogram, Producers Releasing Corporation, Crown Interna- tional, William Mishkin or any other low-rent exploitation house you might name. The story be- hind its production has also be- come the stuff of legend: it was written and scheduled to be di- rected by Jess Franco, who aban- doned the upcoming shoot after an argument with Eurociné, who prevailed upon Jean Rollin to step in, with only a day or two’s no- tice. Though Redemption’s new, digitally restored Blu-ray and DVD proudly accredit Rollin with the direction, he would surely


balk at such paternity; indeed, the final product credits the film’s direction to “J.A. Lazer,” suggest- ing the final cut was left to the more decisive hands of Eurociné producers Marius and Daniel Lesoeur.


Franco was well-known for working from minimal scripting by this stage of his career, hav- ing his cast improvise under his steerage from a basic narrative outline, and it’s clear that little was written down in terms of dialogue. The story can almost be reduced to an anecdotal “See, there’s this lake and it’s full of zombies...” but the idea, which (knowing Franco’s love of horror films from the 1940s) may well have had its roots in Frank Wisbar’s STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP (1946), is addition- ally informed by Jack Arnold’s CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) and Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975; in both cases, subaquatic views of nude or nearly nude girls treading


water) and Ken Wiederhorn’s Florida-made SHOCK WAVES (1977), which introduced the notion of undead Nazi soldiers rising from the sea—which went nowhere here in America but became a somewhat seminal horror trope overseas, inspiring films as recently as Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian film DEAD SNOW (2009). Anyway you look at it, ZOMBIE LAKE is an unde- niably sloppy film, the hapless result of a very personal direc- tor being handed the reins of another man’s project at an al- most fatally late stage of pre- production, but it’s not without interest in terms of the per- sonal touches Rollin was still able to impose upon it, and for what it says unconsciously about post-war European guilt; in a strange way, the lat- ter makes it roughly analo- gous to a European NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in ways that no other European zombie film cared to address.


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